Everyone’s mutual need to make something of themselves locks the populace into repeating cycles. He begins to run jobs in hope of making something of himself, and for something else that he struggles to define. David eventually has no other choice but to fall in with a gang of mercenaries - cyberpunks - after meeting a mysterious but sympathetic netrunner (a hacker, basically) called Lucy. Set in a nondescript year before the video game, its protagonist David Martinez and his overworked mother Gloria are at the bottom of the city’s ladder, with every aspect of their lives weighed down by exorbitant fees.

Better still - with the notable exception of all the jargon, knowledge of 2077 isn’t a price of entry for Edgerunners, which stands alone even as it folds in characters and concepts from the game. That indulgent doubling-down is indicative of what this all is: It’s Cyberpunk, but more. But, in addition to the repetition on all those game’s names, there’s also a funny redundancy in the title of the animated series itself which feels like an encapsulation of the franchise’s ethos - in the world of the show, “edgerunner” is another word for “cyberpunk,” so in a sense this is called Cyberpunk: Cyberpunks. As the names of its lead artists and production studio Trigger loudly announce themselves in splashy, Franz Ferdinand-scored opening credits, you more or less know what you’re in for with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the anime spinoff of the troubled video game Cyberpunk 2077.īoth the video game and this cartoon, created by Rafal Jaki, are based off the 1988 tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020, whose counter-culture vibe was shaped by its creator, outspoken designer Mike Pondsmith.

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